1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to a process for identifying short duration, transitory patient events and suspending alarms that are otherwise sent to clinicians.
2. Background
Healthcare organizations place a high value on the collection of real-time physiological parametric information about patients. Such parametric information can include, among other things, a patient's heart rate or other heart function, blood pressure, blood oxygen level, and respiratory rate. This parametric information is typically detected by sensors, attached to a patient, and the sensors transmit the detected physiological information over a wired or wireless link to a patient monitoring device which can in turn be in communication with a local network maintained by the healthcare organization. Subsequent to collecting patient parametric information, a monitor can analyze the information for the purpose of generating and sending alarms to clinicians alerting them to a patient's condition or event, which can be for example a low heart rate or low blood pressure condition. In order for a monitor to determine whether or not an alarm should be generated, a threshold value associated with each physiological parameter can be set. For example, if it is clinically determined that an alarm should be generated when a patient heart rate falls below eighty beats per minute, then the threshold value for recognizing a low heart rate can be set to eighty.
Some events detected by patient monitors can persist for a clinically significant period of time and should always cause an alarm to be generated. Other events only persist for a clinically insignificant period of time (short duration events), and typically, clinicians do not want to be notified each time a short duration event is detected as this type of event is generally considered to be a false indication of a patient's medical condition. A condition referred to as clinician alarm fatigue can occur in the case that a relatively large number of short duration events cause a monitor to generate and send a correspondingly large number of alarms. To the extent that alarm fatigue is a problem, at time a clinician may not respond to an alarm that is not false. This behavior places a patient's health at risk.
One technique that is employed to resolve the problem of alarm fatigue, is to adjust monitor threshold values so that the monitor detects fewer events. For instance, low heart rate threshold can be set to a lower value (75 instead of 80 bpm for instance) such that an event is only detected if a patient's heart rate falls below seventy five beats per minute. Another technique that is used to prevent nuisance alarms is to suspend alarms that are generated due to short duration events. That is, if an event is active for less than a specified period of time (suspend time period), the monitor can cancel the event and not generate an alarm. Yet another solution to this problem is to tie the generation of an alarm to multiple different types of events (heart rate and blood pressure for instance). So, if a patient's heart rate is detected to fall below a threshold value (even for a short period of time) and at substantially the same time their blood pressure also falls below a threshold value, then the monitor can generate and send an alarm. It was found that making the generation of an alarm contingent on to related, but different types of events occurring at substantially the same time reduces the number of nuisance alarms generated by a monitor.